The Undead

Big Papi’s late innings.

Great athletes are often said to experience time on the playing field in a kind of slow motion. Instinctual stoners, their hearts don’t race. Frenzy doesn’t trouble them, or even register in their minds as frenzy. What we sometimes call rising to the occasion, from this vantage, is an invention of panicked souls whose metabolisms are not suited to the pace of competition.

David Ortiz, who owns a plaque identifying him as the “Greatest Clutch Hitter in the History of the Boston Red Sox,” has a more deliberate relationship with the clock. The world waits for him. Pitchers, umpires, reporters: Don’t rush this guy. Ortiz is a large man—six feet four and about two hundred and fifty pounds—who wears an even larger uniform that, in its bagginess, suggests a leisurely disposition. Not for nothing is he known as Big Papi. As a designated hitter, his sole job, for which he is paid thirteen million dollars a year, is to bat four or five times a game. Naturally, he likes to make the most of his few appearances onstage. Ortiz approaches the plate with a stride that is all hips and shoulders—a Dominican cowboy, grasping the barrel of his bat, instead of the handle, as if to accentuate the spread of his hand. Upon arrival at the batter’s box, he faces the pitcher and begins digging at the back of the paint with his left foot, like a bull before a charge. He doesn’t just step out between pitches; he goes for a stroll. When the pitcher looks ready, he asks for a time-out so that he can tuck the lumber under his armpit, spit into the palm of his right batting glove, and clap down forcefully with the left. “For the grip,” he says, although it looks more like he is swatting a fly, and you’ll see him perform the gesture even when he’s biding his time in the on-deck circle. It’s a mood-setter. He may be slow, but he means business. As he put it to me, “I want to fuck some people up out there when I’m playing.”

In the clubhouse, Ortiz is sociable without being ingratiating. He has his priorities: the stereo, for instance, and accessorizing (earrings, shades, caps). I have never seen him shave, but that beard—more face mask than chin strap, with some breathing room above and below the lips—must require real care. After the Red Sox clinched a playoff berth in 2004, Ortiz introduced forethought and patience to the traditional cork-popping celebration, retreating to the bathroom and emerging with goggles and a hose that he’d hooked up to a faucet. Beat writers covet his affection, despite the fact that he has a penchant for profanity that renders most of his utterances unquotable. What he offers is perspective. He is a humorist, re-stating questions in blunter terms and reducing things to their essence (“Why they whooping our ass?”). On more than one occasion, he has advised the reporters hovering around him to go home and get laid. The baseball season is long, he reminds us. Chill out.

Amid declining attendance at a number of major-league ballparks, many observers have pointed to the upward-creeping length of individual games, and, by extension, to languorous approaches like Ortiz’s, as potential problems in need of fixing. Kids need to get home to bed. All that spitting and clapping adds up. After the Yankees and Red Sox opened the season, in April, with a series of three-and-a-half-hour marathons at Fenway Park, the umpire Joe West publicly rebuked both teams for what he called a “pathetic and embarrassing” display, “a disgrace to the game.” Ortiz was, by this peculiar standard, the worst offender—a recent study by the Post revealed that his at-bats last the longest, on average, of any Yankee or Red Sox player—but the home-town press were more immediately concerned with a greater potential embarrassment. Forget the posturing between pitches; it was the speed of Ortiz’s swing that they were worried about. Scouts had been whispering throughout spring training that he could no longer catch up with a big-league fastball. He was thirty-four, and already cheating, as they say: starting his weight shift before the pitcher’s release, and thereby leaving himself vulnerable to changeups and breaking stuff, the mark of a novice—or of a has-been.

Ortiz failed to record a hit in either of the first two games. He walked, struck out, flied out, popped up, and grounded out four times. Oh for seven. Perspective requires me to point out that everyone goes oh for seven at one point or another in the season—more likely several times. But David Ortiz commands a special kind of attention. Two years ago, the Steinbrenners spent fifty thousand dollars to exhume a Boston jersey bearing his No. 34 that had been buried in the concrete foundation of the new Yankee Stadium by a construction worker—a double agent from Red Sox Nation—intent on hexing the joint. This is the final year of Ortiz’s contract, with the option of renewing for another year resting solely at the Red Sox’ discretion. “Two shitty games and already you motherfuckers are going crazy,” he said, turning to face the scribes seeking a reaction to his “rough start,” as one of them put it. “What’s up with that, man?” That, at least, is the way ESPN’s Gordon Edes transcribed the outburst, subbing in brackets for the expletives, which I have inferred. The Springfield Republican and the Boston Herald had their own minor variations. I know this because a press critic for the Globe followed up with a textual analysis (“What, Exactly, Did David Ortiz Say?”) that was then linked to by the Derek Jeter of media bloggers, Jim Romenesko, alongside evaluations of Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer, and Bill Gates’s notions about the future of the news business. Ortiz is the most beloved baseball player New England has known in a generation, and if we are going to begin writing his athletic obituary we had better be prepared to get it right.

Last year, at the end of May, the Onion published a short item beneath the headline “MLB ADJUSTS DRUG POLICY TO ALLOW DAVID ORTIZ TO TAKE STEROIDS.” After hitting more home runs in the preceding six years than all but three players, Ortiz had only just belted his first homer, some six weeks and forty games into the season. He was batting .203. He looked washed up. The Onion story featured imaginary quotes from baseball’s commissioner, Bud Selig, who had previously singled out Ortiz as a “great symbol” of what he liked to call the sport’s golden age. “Baseball is pretty boring when he’s not hitting home runs,” the Onion’s Selig said. “What David is doing right now is wrong.”

The golden age and the steroid age are one and the same, of course, and two months later the joke was spoiled when the Times reported that Ortiz was among roughly a hundred players who had failed a drug test in 2003—the same test that had brought low the Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez at the start of spring training. The news wasn’t exactly shocking; our belated national soul-searching over “performance enhancement” had already snared enough performers of varying abilities to make further retrospective prosecution pointless. But Ortiz may have been unique among the apparent culprits in the amount of good will he still enjoyed at the time of his comeuppance. He was Big Papi, seemingly the least tortured and conflicted of sports heroes, without the cloying desperation of an A-Rod or the competitive hostility of a Clemens or the spacey indifference of a Manny. Baseball seldom produces personalities like his, as natural in a late-night television studio as in the dugout. A week before the Times report, Ortiz had attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Route 9 in Framingham for Big Papi’s Grille, featuring four varieties of Big Papi En Fuego Hot Sauce. And then, suddenly, even the ghostwriter of his best-selling autobiography, “Big Papi,” which recounted his slow transformation from a shy boy in Santo Domingo, hitting bottle caps with a broomstick, to an extroverted “Dominican Shrek,” was calling that noble story “a myth.”

Ortiz, who had once said of drug testers, “All they are going to find is a lot of rice and beans,” was compelled to add that he had also “used a lot of supplements and vitamins,” and not necessarily in accordance with the Surgeon General’s recommended daily allowances. His was a gray-area defense, endorsed by both the Players Association and his bosses: he knew not what he’d done. In parts of the Dominican Republic, anabolic agents can be bought over the counter. (Larry Lucchino, the Red Sox C.E.O., recalled the incident recently as “an unfortunate episode of some kind of inadvertent ingestion,” and stressed that he knew of no evidence of any “injection,” as though the absence of a needle were a distinction of moral importance.) The media, having been burned too many times on the subject, were more skeptical, if not wholly unsympathetic. The gulf between athletes’ private sense of self-discipline and determination and the public’s easy moralizing remains too large to accommodate subtleties. “That was the toughest thing I’ve ever had to write,” Tony Massarotti, the disavowing ghostwriter, told me recently, referring to his public row-back, which appeared in his Globe blog. “He’s an incredibly good-hearted guy.”

“I never thought that buying supplements and vitamins, it was going to hurt anybody’s feelings,” Ortiz said at his televised confessional. The feelings it hurt were primarily Ortiz’s own. He had always prided himself on being an open book, and regarded the media’s newfound wariness as a betrayal. Big Papi wasn’t a myth, but he was a sensitive human being as well as a brand, and one came to remember, as Ortiz’s vulnerability revealed itself, that this was the same guy who had put on a life jacket when the Red Sox’ World Series parade, in 2004, reached the Charles River. He was a giant, but still, in some respects, an innocent.

What was more important—what is always more important—is that he was hitting home runs again. From June on, he tied for the league lead. In December, while hosting a charity event to raise money for a children’s hospital, Ortiz relaxed on a sofa by the thirteenth tee on a golf course in Punta Cana, in the Dominican Republic, and reflected on his difficult year to the Herald’s Michael Silverman. “A lot of people were trying to say I’m old, I can’t play anymore, this and that,” he said. “Old at thirty-three? What the hell is that?” He had lost weight, and was looking forward to starting fresh in 2010.

Two shitty games became ten, and by the middle of April Ortiz was officially a platoon player, starting only against right-handed pitchers, while Mike Lowell, another aging fan favorite, handled southpaws. In the third week of the season, after striking out for the seventeenth time in forty tries, and then popping up, Ortiz snapped his bat over his knee. It was the closest he’d come yet to a demonstration of real power. When his next at-bat came around, the Sox manager, Terry Francona, sent in a pinch-hitter. On Big Papi’s Blog, Ortiz described the slight as “maybe my first embarrassing moment wearing this uniform.” But seven days later it happened again, in still more humiliating fashion. The Sox were in Toronto, tied 1–1 in the eighth. The bases were loaded, with two outs. Ortiz had built his reputation on situations like this. From the dugout, Francona called to him. Ortiz, who was standing in the on-deck circle, working on his grip, either didn’t hear or didn’t want to. (Toronto’s Skydome is sparsely attended these days, and about as noisy as a library.) He nearly reached the plate before looking over his shoulder to see Lowell approaching, bat in hand. Talk about a walk of shame: Ortiz took the long route back, avoiding his manager and exiting the field at the far end of the dugout. Rumor later had it that he sulked his way out of the ballpark altogether, which both he and Francona deny, but a review of the videotape will reveal this much, at least: Big Papi did not appear on the field for the team’s eventual victory celebration. Lowell, who had drawn a base on balls in Ortiz’s stead, forcing in the go-ahead run, was credited with the game-winning R.B.I.

It wasn’t just that Ortiz was batting .150; it was that he looked so frequently helpless in his attempts. One game, Gordon Edes observed, he was thrown nothing but heaters—nineteen of them—and failed to connect for a single fair ball. “When he hits it, it’s surprising,” ESPN’s Bill Simmons, a.k.a. the Sports Guy, said on the radio. “I remember being woefully, woefully concerned last year, but still holding on to a shred of hope. . . . When he finally did hit the homers, it was ‘Oh, he’s back, baby!’ This year, I’m not feeling it.”

Making matters worse for Ortiz was the fact that the team was struggling almost as badly as he was. The starting catcher, Victor Martinez, had developed one of those mental blocks that cause throwing the ball to seem like an impossible task, and opposing teams were happily exploiting his condition, stealing bases more or less at will. Not that such incremental advancements mattered much when the staff ace, Josh Beckett, was on the mound, stubbornly refusing to use his curveball and yielding strings of extra-base hits as karmic punishment. So much for the “run prevention” that Theo Epstein, the general manager, had announced as the team’s new focus before the start of the season, in the course of warning us that this might be a “bridge year,” or what passes for rebuilding at a franchise with permanently high expectations and pockets deeper than all but the Yankees’. The sports commentariat couldn’t help pointing out that, between Ortiz and Lowell, the Red Sox were spending twenty-five million dollars on one lineup slot—the most expensive d.h. in history.

By the time the Sox returned to Fenway for a ten-game home stand, at the beginning of May, they were already seven games back in the standings, and coming off a sweep at the hands of the Baltimore Orioles, who had won just three of twenty games against teams other than Boston. The old New England fatalism, largely absent in Ortizian times, was returning, and one heard jokes that the local nine would likely be eliminated from contention before either the hockey or the basketball team, both still alive in their respective playoffs. That the Red Sox would not be interested in picking up Ortiz’s option for 2011 was now taken as a given by all but the big man himself. Yet a grimmer scenario was emerging, first as idle speculation and then with the grudging endorsement of every expert within reach of a microphone. It involved a pink slip, maybe even before the start of summer.

Ortiz spent the first game of this make-or-break home stand on the bench, watching Lowell stroke three doubles in a cathartic Red Sox romp over the Angels. The next night offered my first live glimpse of the slugger in decline. He came up with two on and two out in the bottom of the first, drew the count full, and whiffed on a slider in the dirt. In the third, he fared no better, producing an inning-ending double play on a hard grounder up the middle that might have been a base hit but for the clever positioning of the Angels’ shortstop, just two steps to the left of second base. Tough luck, was my first thought. But Ortiz in his prime inspired opposing managers to shift their infielders even more radically rightward, as though defending against Ted Williams. This abbreviated shift the Angels were employing was an earned form of disrespect.

Between at-bats, I took the virtual pulse of the Nation, via the Sons of Sam Horn message boards, where diehards of a certain generational cast engage in nightly group-therapy rituals, rehashing the events on their television screens in real time instead of waiting for the next morning’s call-in shows. “At this point Ortiz is such a disaster that if the Sox release him, FEMA would have to drive him to the airport,” one fan wrote. Another pointed out that Lars Anderson, the franchise’s top-rated prospect, had just homered for Pawtucket, the Sox’ AAA affiliate in Rhode Island (“Hey Papi, don’t look behind you”), and I recalled my first glimpse, back in 1987, of the eponymous Sam Horn himself: a left-handed sequoia with no glove, an Anderson who never quite blossomed into an Ortiz. Clicking around some more, I noticed that Horn’s career line was scarcely different from that of Ortiz at the point, in 2003, when the Red Sox’ new management rescued him from the Minnesota Twins’ discard heap. Some careers end too early.

Leading off the bottom of the sixth, Ortiz fanned on three pitches, and out came the Fenway boo-birds, lagging behind their Internet counterparts by a few innings. A final opportunity at redemption arrived in the eighth, as the Sox loaded the bases with nobody out. The crowd—a sellout for the five-hundred-and-sixty-fifth consecutive time, we were reminded—rose to its feet and did its best to summon old memories of glory. Pa-pi, Pa-pi. Fastball, outside. (Spit, clap.) Fastball, high. (Spit, clap-clap.) Ortiz swung at the third delivery, another fastball, and topped it: two bounces to the second baseman, who fired home for a force at the plate. Ortiz, meanwhile, was still lumbering down the line, and the catcher took a quick step toward the mound before throwing to first, so as to avoid pegging him in the back. Double play. In the stands, disbelief slid into sympathy for the grimacing man with his hands on his hips and his head tilted back, searching for answers.

I suppose it would be irresponsible not to mention that Ortiz’s teammates let him off the hook, rallying with a walk and two hits and building a lead that held up, but the lasting impression was of tragic failure. Fandom is perpetually at war with rationality; individual events are seldom as significant as they seem in the moment. And yet knowing this is not the same as accepting it. A flair for imbuing dramatic moments with larger meaning is what had always elevated Ortiz from the ranks of slugging mortals. Stephen King: “I was there when he ended a play-off game (in the 10th) against the Angels with a home run. My companion that day was my dying mother-in-law, and she looked for a moment like a Raphael Virgin Mary, with the light shining all around her head.” If ever it was going to be possible to diagnose a terminal condition on the spot, then surely this was the occasion. Online: “This is like some B movie about passing the torch.” In the elevator at the press-box level: “What’s the over/under on Ortiz’s release date?” At the Howard Johnson’s bar, next door, among the Fenway grounds crew: “Papi’s done, dude.”

Ortiz was hardly sleeping. As a d.h., he told me, “if you’re not hitting, you don’t think you’re doing anything.” Like a compulsive self-Googler, he seemed acutely aware of what was being said about him, and on constant guard against perceived acts of disloyalty, even as he sought to avoid being drawn into the discussion, ducking out early after games and hiding between his headphones and behind his laptop before batting practice. The clubhouse is a place of refuge, home away from home. “I spend more time here than at my house, so I got to feel comfortable doing things around here,” he said. But he was clearly uncomfortable now that the national media had descended on Boston, with everyone stealing glances his way, “always looking for that one moment,” as Jerry Remy, the former second baseman turned color commentator for NESN, the Red Sox’ cable network, put it, in predicting that Ortiz was due to “erupt.”

NESN, following the double-play debacle, had invited viewers to participate in a poll about Ortiz’s fate. It was far from the only media outlet to be conducting such a poll, but it was the only one that shared a boss with Ortiz, whose displeasure rose up the organizational masthead, prompting fatherly visits from the team’s chairman, Tom Werner, and principal owner, John Henry. “I think part of being a baseball player is thinking positive thoughts,” Werner told me. “John’s and my comments to him are, you know, ‘We’re completely in your corner, as we’ve been the whole time.’ ”

You want to avert your eyes in situations like this, but you can’t. One afternoon, I found Ortiz flirting gamely at his locker with a female television reporter, declaring that fat people cannot also be muscular. (For a man so celebrated on account of his girth, Ortiz is strangely sensitive about his appearance, insisting in his autobiography, for instance, that he is svelter and nimbler than he appears on TV.) “There’s no way you can be fat all the way around and have arms like this—guns like this,” he said, and flexed, exposing the tattoo of his late mother’s face below his right shoulder.

“You want to talk to us today?” the reporter finally asked, plaintively. Asking a man to make sense of his ongoing failures—to participate in the writing of his own eulogy—is an act of cruelty, however delicately broached. Yet this is what we do. If he flips out, or whimpers and whines, so much the better, not only for the news cycle but for our consciences as fans, in desperate need of a reason to overcome our sentimental attachments. Ortiz consented, and spoke for the next several minutes at a volume well below his usual bellow. “See, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” the woman said, when they had finished. A newspaper reporter was now hovering; interviews attract attention. Ortiz, who had just conceded that his days in Boston might be numbered (“If you don’t play here, you got to play somewhere else, you know?”), didn’t appear eager to repeat the process. Seeking relief, he glanced at the clubhouse television, which was tuned to a news program about a lettuce recall prompted by fears of E. coli contamination. “Is that weed?” he shouted, feigning excitement at the image of leafy greens on the screen, and then grabbed his phone and, excusing himself (“Give me a sec”), disappeared into the training room. The newsman waited patiently, but Papi wasn’t coming back.

“People, man, they love hurting people,” Ortiz later told me. “It’s not even fair. What’s going to happen when I start hitting, you know? Just say a guy’s in a slump, whatever, but that’s about it. Let it go.” By “people,” he obviously meant the press. He persisted in his belief that the fans “get pleasure just because of the fact of you playing hard and trying,” as he put it. “The fans know that I don’t give at-bats away.”

It wasn’t that simple, of course. Rare is the athlete who admits, in the middle of a slump, that what he is facing is in fact the beginning of the end. The long at-bats, formerly suffused with a menacing tension, had become thoroughly anxious affairs for most fans—a cause of indigestion, according to Tom Werner, made all the more difficult by Ortiz’s transparent desire to please. Ted Williams refused to tip his cap. Pedro Martínez, insufficiently troubled by the diminution of his skills, committed the grave sin of calling the Yankees his “daddy,” and rhapsodized about sitting under a mango tree, back home in the D.R.; baseball, which had been very, very good to him, was not his life, as it was ours. Ortiz, meanwhile, was our papi. Who could bear several more months of this sputtering?

Rooting against Big Papi, Bill Simmons once said, is like giving up on Santa Claus. But we all abandon Santa at some point, and the process is rarely belabored. I heard from a number of people who were torn, with each successive Ortiz appearance, about whether to wish for a home run—which could be presumed to buy him more time on the roster, prolonging the agony—or a strikeout. “You know, the two home runs don’t convince me, fellas.” So said Donna, a sixty-one-year-old talk-radio caller who insisted that her love of Ortiz and the Sox was unsurpassed. “I’ve got the DVDs from the ’04, the ’07, the Yankees series, the whole bit.” The two homers in question—Ortiz’s second and third of the season—arrived in the same game, but against the lowly Orioles, and revived the notion, used by some to explain the late power surge last season, that his sole capability lay in exploiting bad pitching.

Similarly dismissible, then, was No. 4, which came the night after the epic failure against the Angels, because the Los Angeles starter had made the curious mistake of throwing an offspeed pitch—one that Ortiz pushed the other way, over the Green Monster in left. This could have been interpreted as evidence that Ortiz wasn’t cheating as much as was suspected, but we were too deep into the farewell narrative by this point. (“Watch the replay,” one of the Sam Horn cynics advised. “He was late on the swing and got lucky because it was a changeup.”) That Monster shot fell on the occasion of a slightly awkward homecoming for the former face of the franchise, Nomar Garciaparra, who was unceremoniously cast off in a trade in the summer of 2004, and thus deprived of the parades and the shedding of all that regional angst. “You don’t think about that as a player, having a night like this,” Garciaparra told his former press-corps antagonists before throwing out the first pitch. “I had no control over leaving.”

“Tonight, we’ll really find out,” a longtime Brookline resident told me a few days later, before settling in for a game against the Yankees and their bright-armed starter Phil Hughes. Ortiz soon fanned, seeming to confirm the prediction, but then brought us all to our feet in the fourth, when he pulled a ninety-m.p.h. fastball high and deep to right. “Warning-track power,” Mr. Brookline declared, after New York’s Nick Swisher had hauled it in at the edge of the outfield grass. Still, it was far enough to score the runner from third on a tag, and in his next trip up Ortiz ripped an R.B.I. single through the middle on another fastball, low and away—the pitch, he had just told me, he was having the toughest time with. These small successes, defiantly inconclusive, were hard to appreciate, as they represented pauses in the countdown when what we wanted was acceleration or reversal.

Reversal is what we got, gradual at first (“It just doesn’t happen the way people think it’s supposed to happen, from one day to another,” Ortiz told me), and then stunning, although identifying the precise moment of the resurrection will not be easy. When the Sox left Boston for Detroit in mid-May, Ortiz was carrying a five-game hitting streak, an almost DiMaggian feat, considering where he’d been, but he had only just broken .200 and was still striking out nearly half the time. He opened the road trip with back-to-back home runs, the first of them travelling about as far beyond the center-field fence as anyone at Comerica Park could remember. Down in the Bronx a few days later, he went deep again, off young Phil Hughes. And the next night, after mashing a Joba Chamberlain slider into the right-center gap, he stood awhile, admiring his handiwork (“Sometimes you can see the ball going small,” he said), before being jolted out of his reverie as the ball, held up in the humid air, caromed off the wall. Oops—hurry! Watching Ortiz run is one of those incongruous pleasures, like fried pickles, and for a few seconds, as he scrambled to make up for lost time, you could see the desperation of a younger man. He was out at second by a mile, but this was no longer embarrassing. Hubris is fun.

The home runs kept coming. Ortiz’s victory laps, already the slowest in the league, were getting progressively slower, finally crossing the half-minute mark: a Roger Bannister milestone in reverse. He was making us wait again, his greatest time-defying act yet. Let him enjoy it.

“I’m going to be done when I’ve decided that I’m done,” Ortiz announced on WEEI’s “Big Show,” to which he granted a score-settling interview in exchange for an opportunity at some brand extension. What better occasion than the silencing of his critics to plug the new Big Papi’s Kitchen Peach Mango Salsa?

Seventh-inning stretch, eyes on the dugout: Ortiz grabs a helmet and heads for the bat rack, pausing briefly in front of Mike Lowell, whom he touches gently on the shoulder. No words are necessary. Lowell, grizzled and stoic, deposits his shades in his cap. His night is done. This kind of symmetry can’t be invented. Terry Francona has asked Ortiz, whom the American League just named May’s Player of the Month, to pinch-hit.

Lowell had gone from playing less than regularly to virtually not at all. When he did bat now, he predictably failed, his performance almost perfectly counterbalancing Ortiz’s on each trajectory. (Twenty-five million dollars, apparently, will buy you only half a designated hitter.) No one thrust any cameras in his face, and he received no morale-boosting visits from upper management. He was left, instead, to rot on the bench. “Watching Mikey just watch the game, it’s uncomfortable,” Ortiz said.

When I saw Ortiz next, in mid-June, he had weathered another slump (one for twenty-seven) and settled into a more sustainable cycle of boomlets and busts, befitting a man of his age—and dampening somewhat the inevitable snickering that his transformation must have been chemically enabled. (“You have to wonder, don’t you?” one N.L. team executive mused. “We’ve all been conditioned to be suspicious of the amazing.”) “You struggle, you work to get out of it,” Ortiz said. “I don’t go back to my house, sit down to sleep, wake up the next day, and just wait for the magic. Unh-unh. I’m thinking about what I’m doing wrong. I watch baseball. I think about baseball. I eat baseball. I shit baseball.”

After thirteen seasons in the majors, Ortiz said that he still approached the game “like I’m a Little Leaguer,” but as he bent down to remove his socks he winced. “This game ain’t easy,” he said. “If the game was easy, you wouldn’t be doing what you’re doing. You’d be playing baseball, ’cause they pay a lot of money for it.”

Ortiz was wearing a T-shirt from the 2008 All-Star Game, his last, and the Player of the Month trophy was on prominent display above his locker, as though both he and we still needed reminding. The Red Sox, as if by some miracle, were only a game out of first place, but the scars from his brutal spring hadn’t healed, and he spent much of our conversation dismissing unnamed skeptics. “People think they got everything figured out,” he said. “They don’t know shit. ‘Bat speed.’ This, that.” He pointed to the trophy above his head. “Hope they come in and take a photo of that.”

The Dodgers were in town, and that meant another homecoming for one of Ortiz’s old teammates, the mercurial Manny Ramirez, for whom Ortiz had long served as an unofficial translator. (Ramirez, Ortiz once told me, was a “crazy motherfucker,” who lived “in his own world, on his own planet.”) Thousands of “Who Needs Manny?” placards were distributed to arriving spectators as part of a radio promotion. Ramirez, though a former World Series M.V.P., was booed more than he was cheered, and this distressed his friend. “That part I don’t understand,” Ortiz said. “I’m not a fan yet. I will be one day, probably of my kids, probably of the teams I played for. ’Cause I’m not going to be a baseball player my whole life, right?”

Ortiz homered against the Dodgers, his team-leading fifteenth of the season, and his two hundred and seventy-fourth in a Red Sox uniform, tying him with none other than Ramirez for fifth all-time on the franchise leaderboard. In San Francisco, a week later, he climbed ahead, with a blast off the reigning N.L. Cy Young winner, Tim Lincecum: over the arcade and into the bay. Then, against Tampa, he sent a ninety-three-m.p.h. fastball over the bullpen. His future, for the duration of this season, but maybe not beyond, remains in Boston, and with some luck there could be another post-season run—another chance at autumn heroics of the sort that eluded Yaz and Ted Williams but that Ortiz has made his singular specialty. ♦

Ben McGrath began working at The New Yorker in 1999, and has been a staff writer since 2003.